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Spread, roughen and spatter any transparent PNG — then recolour the ink and keep the background clear. Straight onto your mockup.
Adjust → Contrast sharpens the boundary between ink and no-ink before any bleed is applied. Raise it if your artwork has soft or anti-aliased edges you want the bleed to bite into cleanly.
Adjust → Ink amount is the overall weight of ink laid down. Think of it as how heavily the press was inked: low values give a starved, patchy print, high values a saturated one that fills its own detail in.
Bleed → Spread is how far ink creeps outward from the original edge. This is the core control. A small spread reads as a good print on decent paper; a large one reads as ink soaking into something absorbent.
Bleed → Roughness is how irregular that creeping edge is. Spread without roughness just looks like a blur — roughness is what makes it look like a physical material fighting back. If your result looks fake, this is almost always the setting to raise.
Bleed → Spatter throws detached flecks of ink beyond the edge, the way a squeegee or a stamp flicks. A little goes a long way; past about half it stops reading as print and starts reading as splatter.
Colour → Full colour keeps your original colours. Turn it off and Ink lets you set a single ink colour — which is what you want if you’re mocking up a one-colour screen print.
Colour → Transparent keeps the background clear so the result drops onto a garment or mockup with no masking. Turn it off and Background gives you a solid colour behind.
Texture → Paper texture adds the fibre structure ink is bleeding into. Small detail, disproportionate effect — it’s what stops the bleed looking like it happened in a vacuum.
Turn Full colour off, set Ink to your print colour, leave Transparent on, and export. You get a PNG of your graphic — bled, roughened, spattered — with nothing behind it. Drop it onto a garment in the Mockup Generator and it sits on the fabric like a print rather than a sticker.
Change the ink colour and re-export to see the same graphic in every colourway you’re considering, before anyone pulls a screen.
For apparel work specifically:
Letterpress is the opposite extreme: low spread, low spatter, high contrast, and the character comes from the bite rather than the bleed.
Both are useful on packaging, labels, zines and anything that wants to look handled rather than generated.
The other route is buying a stamp texture pack and masking your artwork into it, which gives you one fixed result you’ll recognise on someone else’s work within a month.
Here it’s live and parametric. Change the spread, watch the whole thing change. Nothing to install, runs on desktop, tablet or phone, exports a transparent PNG.
How far it travels depends on the absorbency of the material, the viscosity of the ink and how long the two are in contact. Newsprint bleeds heavily because it’s cheap uncoated stock. Coated papers barely bleed at all. Fabric bleeds unevenly because the weave gives ink different distances to travel in different directions.
Printers spend their careers minimising it. Designers spend theirs putting it back, because a perfectly clean edge is the visual signature of something that was never physically made — and an irregular one is proof that ink met a material and the material won.
The generator is free to play with. Uploading your own image and exporting is part of a Studio Innate subscription — which also includes the Scene Editor, the 3D Editor, 250+ mockup templates and every other generator in the suite.
Get a feel for the core features
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Mockup & Effects Generator plan
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Get a feel for the core features
No credit card required
Mockup & Texture Generator plan
Cancel anytime / Secure payment
Yes. Leave Transparent switched on and the exported PNG has no background at all, so it drops straight onto a garment or mockup with no masking. Turn it off and you can set a solid background colour instead.
Yes. Turn Full Colour off and set your own ink colour — useful for mocking up a one-colour screen print, or for exporting the same graphic in several colourways before anyone pulls a screen.
Raise Roughness. Spread on its own just blurs the edge; roughness is what makes it look like ink meeting a physical material. Turning Paper Texture on helps for the same reason.
Keep Spread low, around 0.3 to 0.6, since real garment printing bleeds but not dramatically. Push Roughness higher than feels right, because fabric weave makes edges irregular in a way paper does not. Use Spatter sparingly, as on a garment it reads as a printing fault rather than character.
A transparent PNG works best — a logo, a piece of type or a print-ready graphic. Other images work, but the tool is built for artwork that is going somewhere afterwards.
It is capillary action. Paper and fabric are made of fibres with gaps between them, and liquid ink wicks along those gaps after it lands, so the printed area ends up slightly larger and less regular than whatever laid it down. Absorbent materials like newsprint bleed heavily; coated papers barely bleed at all.
Yes. Every export on a paid plan carries a full commercial licence, with no watermarks and no per-use fees.
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Scene Pro feature
Play with the sample image as much as you like. Scene Members can run the effect on their own artwork and export the finished file plus print-ready separations.
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